Surrender Our Status...

"Surrender" is a tricky thing! There tend to be a lot of areas that are easy for us to give over to God. If we're honest, though, there are probably some areas of our lives that are easier for us to hold on to. Perhaps these are some of the intangible areas, like our status-- those areas that are hard to define, and hard to determine how much Christ should influence them. 

The orange notes represent what we want to surrender about our status

We talked about how our status, especially in middle school and high school, can be quite dependent upon what our peers think of us. We talked about the positive and negative aspects of status. We also talked about how much Jesus emphasized the opposite of what society often thinks regarding status-- that the last will be first, servants will be honored, and the lowly raised up. We looked at descriptions in Isaiah about the coming servant of God and how he would not be what people expected!

Here's what some of our youth are seeking to surrender:

"To do things for me, not because it will look good to my friends."    "To learn to serve so that I can lead."  " To leave the status quo behind." "To reach out to those who are 'outcasts' and be a better friend."

As we continue on our Lenten journey, we are going to spend this last Sunday before Easter discussing a difficult topic... sin. It is one of those areas that churches seem to either spend all their time focusing on, or very little of their time acknowledging. Where is the balance? What did Jesus have to say about sin? How do we acknowledge our mistakes, and learn from them? 

Join us at Inside Out this Sunday as we explore all these questions and more!